When We Wake (9 page)

I hesitated in the doorway. Marie, who could be ruthless when she wanted, nudged me through.

“Geya,” I said, the slang greeting sitting awkwardly on my tongue. “I’m Tegan.” They were the first words I’d spoken to someone my own age since I woke up.

“Hello,” she replied, turning toward me. Bethari was a really pretty girl with light brown skin and a few dark freckles sprinkled
over her cheeks. Her nose was long and turned up at the end. She was wearing a flowing dress made of purple memory fabric and a gorgeous yellow-patterned headscarf. “I’m Bethari.”

I scrubbed my hands on my linen drawstring pants, wishing I’d had a chance to do some shopping.

“Um, so, thanks for agreeing to do this,” I said. “It’s really kooshy of you.”

Bethari’s thin eyebrows jumped, but her face returned to polite blankness. “You’re welcome,” she said.

Marie beamed. “Why don’t you show Bethari your room, Tegan, and I’ll prepare a snack? You girls don’t need us old ladies standing about.”

Zaneisha’s expression remained absolutely impassive, but I had the feeling she disagreed with this assessment. “Sure,” I said. “Come downstairs.”

We walked down the spiral staircase in absolute silence. My skin was crawling all over with embarrassment.

“So, this is my room,” I said.

Bethari barely glanced around. “It’s nice,” she said, sitting carefully on the edge of my bed.

It
was
nice, though I still wasn’t used to having no windows. A skyshaft to the surface let in natural light, but it wasn’t the same.

Still, the decor was good. The furniture was all matching blond wood. Marie had let me choose prints to make and hang, and I’d mostly gone with landscapes of urban decay that reminded me of clambering through old buildings with Alex. On the nightstand was an iron statue of a stylized woman standing half submerged in a cresting wave, long hair hanging
down her back and flowing over her breasts to become the sea. Her features were obscured by rust, and it was hard to tell whether she was rising from the ocean or falling into it, but I liked the shape of her head, and the strength in her outstretched hands. I’d seen the statue on the tubes when Marie was teaching me how to use Koko, and she’d bought it as a surprise.

The prints of my family were tucked in my nightstand drawer. I didn’t want them on display.

Bethari was just sitting there, like a breathing statue, eyes fixed unwaveringly on my face.

“Uh,” I said. What did people
talk
about in the future? Well, school was standard. “What’s your specialty at Elisabeth Murdoch?”

The school was one for talented students, and everyone was supposed to have a specialty that they trained in. Marie’s had been biology, and she’d assured me that I’d love the training and attention from the specialty teacher.

“Journalism,” Bethari said, and pinched her mouth closed again, as if every word was costing her money.

I had no idea why Marie thought I’d be friends with this snobby, closed-off girl, but I hadn’t had high hopes to start with. Most friend setups, in my experience, turned out pretty badly. It was the people you met by accident who worked out.

I met Alex when she was the girl in the seat opposite me on the train, crying behind her tattered book.

I ignored her sniffs for a little while, and then I put my hand out flat in front of her, palm up. I didn’t touch her. That didn’t seem right, somehow.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

The girl lowered the book, and for the first time I saw what had been done to her face. She had a big purple bruise right up her jaw, and half hidden behind her tangled fringe, her left eyebrow had a cut that was crusted over with red-black blood.

The fresh marks stood out over a pattern of pale yellow-and-brown bruises, like the ones I built up over soccer season. Someone had been beating her for a long time.

“No,” she said. She was so direct about it, looking me straight in the eye, that I just let the next words spill out of my mouth.

“Who did that?” I asked.

“Foster parents,” she said. “Do you have any painkillers?”

I rummaged around in my backpack, fighting the sway of the car as we went under the West Gate Bridge, and found some ibuprofen. She swallowed two of the pills dry. When she tipped them into her mouth, her long sleeve rode back, and I saw the sores wrapped around her wrist, red and raw.

I gasped.

“Oh yeah,” she said, and looked absently at the marks. “They tied me up the first time I ran away.”

“Where are you going now?”

“Anywhere.”

“Come home with me,” I said. I was twelve years old, and I’d just started taking the train home from soccer practice by
myself. I didn’t know what to do, or what to say in the face of something this awful. But I was horrified, by the cruelty, by her matter-of-fact reaction to it, and I wanted to fix it. “You can stay with us. My mum’s really nice.”

She looked me over, taking her time, assessing the threat, and happy to let me know she was doing it.

“Okay,” she said finally, and put the book on the seat beside her. “I’m Alex.”

“Tegan,” I said, and from then on—even though she didn’t stay with us long and went to live with a different, much better set of foster parents, even though we argued and teased each other a lot, even though she grew up and got political and hated soldiers and dragged me to rallies when I would much rather have been home with my guitar—we were friends.

I didn’t think things with Bethari would go so well.

“That’s a pretty headscarf,” I blurted, grasping for any topic at all.

But that, of all things, got a reaction. Bethari’s hand rose protectively to her head. “I wear this as a symbol of my faith,” she announced. “I’m Muslim.”

I nodded.

“And no matter what my mother said, I need to know right away. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Of course not,” I said.

She was still watching me, and I realized that she wasn’t being unfriendly. She was being careful.

“A hundred years ago,” she said, “not many of your people were very accepting of Islam.”

“Oh,” I said. “It’s so good that that’s changed.”

Bethari’s eyebrow popped up.

“No, I mean it!” I said. “My boyfriend was Sunni Muslim. People always assumed stuff about him. They said things—he hated it. It was awful.”

“You had a Muslim boyfriend?” she asked, probably not meaning to sound so disbelieving. “What was his name?”

“Dalmar,” I said. “He’d just… he’d be so happy things are better now. I wish he could see it.” And then I had to stop and duck my head to hide the tears, my face burning with just how stupid I must look. Upset over a guy who had been dead for forty-six years, who’d had a long and successful political career, and who married a woman he’d described as “the true love of my life.”

A woman who wasn’t me.

Okay.

I totally lied to you about not looking up my friends and family. It was the first thing I did as soon as I knew how to use Koko. I searched for everything on record, and I regret that more than almost anything else.

I wish I
had
chosen to remember them as they had been.

It’s just hard, all right? It’s hard, even when they had really great lives, like Dalmar and Alex did. Because they had those great lives without me—and feeling that way is stupid and petty and gross, but it’s still hard.

It was much, much worse when I found out about Owen. But that’s not relevant, and I don’t want to talk about it.

But I’ll tell you the truth from now on. I really will.

“Were you with Dalmar long?” Bethari asked after a strained moment.

“One day.” I gulped.

“Oh.” In my peripheral vision, I could see her hands twisting, the first nervous motion she’d made. “Well, was he pretty?”

My head came up. She was smiling, looking as uncertain and uncomfortable as I did.

“Yes,” I said, and a great big bubble of laughter rose from my stomach and out my throat, shattering into high-pitched giggles. “He was so pretty!”

She blinked at me, but it was the kind of infectious laughter you can’t resist, and she started giggling, too. “I can’t believe you said
kooshy
,” she snorted. “That’s what people were saying when I was a ween.”

“A ween?” I cackled. “What’s a ween?”

“A child! A wee one!”

“A kid?”

“Kid!” she howled, and we collapsed on my bed. Every time one of us started to slow down, the other would whisper “kooshy!” or “ween!” and we’d be off again.

Finally, I sat up, wiping tears from my eyes. “You have to teach me some better slang.”

“I will, if you teach me yours,” Bethari said. “Hey, who’s that?”

I followed her eyes.

On the back of my door was a print of that famous picture of John and Yoko. She’s wearing a black top and blue jeans, lying on her back with one arm raised. He’s totally naked, and curled up around her like a comma to her exclamation mark. Her expression is calm, unsmiling. His is passionate as he presses a kiss to her cheekbone. Her eyes are open. His are closed. But they curve into each other; her arm is around his back, her hand just visible at his side; his leg is lifted over her body, his arm wrapped around her head. The photo emphasizes their differences and their connection.

John was murdered on the day that photo was taken, and
Rolling Stone
put it on the cover of their next issue.

After I died, I was on some covers, too.

“It’s John Lennon and Yoko Ono,” I said.

“Were they friends of yours, too?”

I wasn’t sure if she was joking. “No. John was in the Beatles. You know the Beatles?”

“Is that a… oh! A band, right?”

“Right,” I said, relieved.

“They had the song about the daydream believer?”

My relief vanished. “That was the Monkees. Totally different. Imitators put together to capitalize on the Beatles’ success—do people really not know about the Beatles anymore?”

Bethari shrugged. “How much do you know about the music a hundred years before your time?”

I buffed my nails on my boring pants. “1927? That was the year of one of Stravinsky’s operas.
Oedipus Rex
, I think. It was the year
The Jazz Singer
was released, the first talking movie ever, and it was about music. Al Johnson? No, Jolson. And it was the year
Funny Face
first played in New York; it had opened in Philadelphia earlier, to terrible reviews, but the revised version ran on Broadway for two hundred and fifty shows.”